MotoGP

FIRST POINTS FOR IANNONE AS HE ENDS SEVENTH IN THE AMERICAS´ GP

Team Suzuki Press Office – April 23.

Andrea Iannone: 7th - +15.491s

Finally the first points of the 2017 season have arrived for Andrea Iannone at the third round of the championship. The Italian rider was able to advance from 11th to 7th position in today´s Americas GP.

The race day started off better than yesterday´s qualifying. The tarmac’s temperature today was higher and this allowed Iannone to immediately feel more confident in the warm up, and then to finalise a comfortable setup for the race.

Starting from the 11th place in the grid, the Team SUZUKI ECSTAR’s rider more or less maintained his position in the early laps, although struggling a bit to find a comfortable pace and to overtake. He was able to be more competitive in the second half of the race. Lapping at the same average pace as the top 5 riders, he was able to advance several positions to end up in 7th place.

Ken Kawauchi – Technical Manager
“This has been a very difficult weekend: Alex has a big crash and got injured and also Andrea had many crashes. Finally with Andrea we could finish the race and get some points, which is important. I’m very sorry we couldn't prepare the perfect bike for him. But he did a very good job also, supporting Alex and getting to the pins. I’m happy with him. The seventh place doesn’t satisfy me, but I consider this as a starting point for us and I believe we can restart from here to become better and better, race after race. I hope Alex will get better soon and come back to the garage. Also, we have room for improvement to perform better in the European circuits, where I hope we will get the chance to go back on the podium again.”

Davide Brivio – Team Manager
“In the end we are happy for how this day went. At the beginning of the race Andrea struggled to find his rhythm, but then he was able to find a good pace that allowed him to pick up some positions. For this reason, I’d say that, concerning the race, we hit our target which was to arrive at the chequered flag. After two races like those we had in Qatar and Argentina, it was crucial to end the race and get experience. It’s been important to ride many laps with the other riders and fight until the end. This enables data collection not just for our engineers, but also for Andrea to have a better understanding. This will be important information for us, from where we will be able to restart. Now it’s time to go back to Europe, where the Championship will be heating up. We have to restart from here, to take advantage of what we’ve learnt today and move on.”

Andrea Iannone
“I’m really happy because finally I got some good feelings back with the bike, but at the same time I’m not happy at all about the first part of the race. I lost too much time in the first 5 laps, and then it was hard to recover from that. Afterwards, I found a good pace, but having already lost 6 or 7 seconds, it was too hard to recover any more than I did. There will be a very important test we will do on Monday after Jerez, where we will try some different setup configurations that would be impossible to try on a race weekend. For sure this weekend, and especially this morning, we’ve learnt many things. They will be very useful to ensure we arrive in Spain well prepared.”